Résumés
Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research with undergraduate students on their listening and sleeping practices, this essay develops a concept of “so(m)niferous media” to describe how listeners/sleepers use audio media to (re)mediate their experience of the night. The essay outlines key theoretical and practical affinities between sleeping and listening, taking a sociocultural approach to sleep informed by critical work in sound and media studies. Sleeping is reconceived as a sonically mediated, non-conscious experience of listening that participates ambivalently in the 24/7 logic of commodification outlined by Jonathan Crary and others. One unexpected finding of the ethnographic work is that many sleepers deliberately avoid obvious sound media products for sleeping (e.g., sleep playlists and podcasts, noise machines, “nature” sounds, binaural beats, etc) and seek out attention-grabbing social media content instead. Rather than lull themselves to sleep, listeners seem to want to engage their attention fully, while paradoxically shutting it down at the same time. So(m)niferous media thus seem to work directly on the attention of the listener, not the acoustic ambience of the sleeping space.
Résumé
S’appuyant sur une recherche ethnographique menée auprès d’étudiants de premier cycle sur leurs pratiques d’écoute et de sommeil, cet essai développe un concept de « médias so(m)nifères » pour décrire comment les auditeurs/dormeurs utilisent les médias audio pour (re)médier leur expérience de la nuit. L’essai décrit les principales affinités théoriques et pratiques entre le sommeil et l’écoute, en adoptant une approche socioculturelle du sommeil éclairée par un travail critique dans les études du son et des médias. Le sommeil est repensé comme une expérience d’écoute inconsciente et à médiation sonore qui participe de manière ambivalente à la logique de marchandisation 24/7 décrite par Jonathan Crary et d’autres. Une découverte inattendue du travail ethnographique est que de nombreux dormeurs évitent délibérément les produits médiatiques sonores évidents pour dormir (par exemple, les listes de lecture et les podcasts de sommeil, les machines à bruit, les sons « naturels », les battements binauraux, etc.) et recherchent plutôt un contenu de médias sociaux qui attire l’attention. Plutôt que de s’endormir, les auditeurs semblent vouloir engager pleinement leur attention, tout en la fermant paradoxalement en même temps. Les médias so(m)nifères semblent ainsi travailler directement sur l’attention de l’auditeur, et non sur l’ambiance acoustique de l’espace de couchage.
Parties annexes
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